AWA CONFERENCE 2015 OCALA, FL

Transcription

1 AWA CONFERENCE 2015 OCALA, FL DAY 1 SPEECH TRANSCRIPTION FLORIDA CATTLE INDUSTRY OVERVIEW Michael Joyner, Deputy Commissioner of Agriculture I have been around associations a lot of my adult life. I was raised about 30 minutes from here on a farm in Wildwood. The joke when we were teenagers was that if you had a week to live, move to Wildwood because a day feels like a lifetime. Associations matter. I ve seen the farm bureaus. I have seen associations have a very positive impact on issues. So my advice to all of you is thanks for getting involved and stay involved, because it really does matter. My job is to make policy every day and very rarely are they made with out associations. So my first point is I hope you continue to stay involved. The first thing I want to do is talk about Florida agriculture and the 2 nd thing is challenges. The third thing is to give you a snapshot of the Florida cattle industry and the 4 th thing I want to give you some of the ideas we are using in Florida to market beef. Ms. Smith started going down that road a bit. Let s talk about Florida and Florida agriculture. There are three economic pillars here in Florida. Tourism, Construction, & Agriculture. During this last 4 or 5 years when tourism has been off and construction has been off, Agriculture has carried the way.

2 According to IFIS, Florida had approx.: $120 billion economic impact in Florida. We estimate that there is about 2million people that work in Agriculture in Florida. Most people when they think of Florida they think of tourism. But when you get 25 miles off the coast we really depend on Agriculture. There are 47,500 farms in Florida and 80% of those are family farms. Of those 47,000 farms we estimate that 44% of them actually have cattle. Florida is home to the largest cow-calf cattle operation in the country. The Mormon church has about 44,000 momma cows right now. Florida from a land mass perspective is about 34,000,000 acres and of that 9.5 million is in agriculture. Maybe the take home on that is, it s big business in Florida, $120 billion dollar impact. Here is what makes Florida special 300 commodities. A lot of you may be from the Midwest are concentrating 4,5,6 commodities we have 300 and that makes us a bit different. Let s talk briefly about a couple of the indicators that we look to when we talk about the strength of Florida. Exports. The department of agriculture, we have the largest in the country, about 4,000 employees. Florida had a commissioner of agriculture that served for 30 years, he learned from a very early age in his administration that you better do something other than agriculture. You look at the card it says department of agriculture and consumer services, so we do a lot of that 4,000 people are the consumer side of things. One thing that we have in our department is we receive $12 million dollars in our marketing budget for Fresh from Florida produce, beef.

3 Another thing we do in that program we have a 180 men and woman who concentrate on marketing Florida products. Right now today, we have product moving in 160 countries. We ve got partnerships with 65 retail chains that distribute to 40,000 stores worldwide. In 2009 we exported about 2.8 billion dollars worth of product out of Florida. Last year that number jumped to 4.1 billion. Here s another interesting thing. Commissioner Putnam, whom I serve, one of the first things he did is he basically said he wants the school nutrition program, I want it under the department of agriculture. It s one of 3 states where the department of ag. has a school-feeding program. Let me tell you what that means. It means that everyday we are responsible for feeding 1.5 million lunches, annually around 275 million lunches. The big deal is we work with these cafeterias everyday to get fresh fruits and vegetables. We have growers who have put co-ops together and a large portion of their time is spent providing fresh fruits and vegetables to these schools. It has been a wonderful opportunity for us - #1 Improve the school lunches get a better quality lunch before 1.5 million kids a day. It has also opened up new markets for growers. We have seen coops come from farmers markets that only focus on providing food for lunches for these kids. Florida has 14 ports. Port of Miami, when the Panama canal opens in a year and a half, we expect the Panama ships to come into the Miami port. We estimate that 15 different pest diseases will enter the country per year. Oriental fruit fly that we think came in through the port of Miami and put on a FedEx truck and moved into a homeowner is bout to devastate that industry avocados, dragon fruit we ve quarantined the areas and did aerial spraying in Florida for the first time in 25 years.

4 Citrus 3 years ago Florida was producing around 300 million boxes of citrus a year this year we think that the box count will be around 70 million. It s devastating the industry. The challenges we face everyday in agriculture is pest and disease. We work very closely with our land grant university. USF is the land grant university here in Florida. Florida A&M we work with to a lesser extent. here is the issue that keeps us up at night: Water. That s the game changer for us. In Florida, whether you re protecting the everglades, or building a home on West Palm beach, or whether you re raising cattle. Water is the challenge for us. Let me give you an example, which is very close to home. Mr. Stroneck, very wealthy guy, made one of those widgets that goes on every car that we drive, but he came in and purchased approx.: 86,000 acres. Because he owns restaurants he wants to do grass fed beef. The permit he put into the Water Management districts. So Mr. Stroneck and said if I want to feed these cows out grass-fed I m going to need about 13 million gallons of water per day. The community went up and arms and he received a permit for 1.4 million gallons per day instead. What we are trying to do is get ahead of this game. The guy that I work with, the commissioner here, he just returned from Israel he was invited to speak about water issues. I don t know if any of you are from California or Arizona, I can t imagine the decisions you have to make. I think that the key for us in Florida is to make these decisions when we are not in a crisis period. things change when you re not in a

5 crisis. Things look very differently. One of the things we are trying to do is reserve water for agriculture. One of the things that we having, which I m very proud of, is a best management practice program. If you re a cattleman and you sign up for a cattleman BMP and if you implement the best practices on your property you have a presumption that you meet water quality standards. One of the take-homes is we would be glad to spend as much time with you as possible to let you know what we do in Florida when it comes to best management practices. We have a staff of about 70 people and 40 of them are field reps that are working with cattleman and horse breeders and working with best management practices n their farm. We think that we are saving about a billion gallons of water a year through implementation. One of the things we do is Call-share. We get 10s and millions of dollars in the department s budget every year to go out every year and go out and call share with growers. Equipment. usually it s an 80/20 deal. Growers invests, we give them the other. Sec. Smith s son, Marty, he has implemented BMPs on his farm. When the EPD or whomever comes out there, Marty simply says Look here are my BMPs, I m implementing every one of those. Right now we think that we got about 7million acres of farmland and cattle land enrolled in the BMP program. If I were in another state, it s a way to get out in front of this water issue. Let me give you some numbers. According to USDA last year, cash receipts in Florida came to $867million dollars. We ve got about a little less than a million head of cattle in Florida. I mentioned earlier, the largest ranch in the United States is here in Florida and the last number I saw was 44,000 head of cattle there. The 2 nd largest operation is the Seminole tribe with 17,000 momma cows there.

6 Florida is a cow-calf state. Of the top 5 cow-calf operations in the US, Florida has 3. Here are some trends that are getting real interesting. Again, being a cow-calf state these cattleman are weaning cattle and they are shipping them out west to be fed out. One of the things we are seeing more and more have is cattle staying within the state. And I think that the number I heard was that a local operation fed about 25,000 steers. It s very interesting. These guys are not shipping as many cattle out as they used to. Why are they doing that? There is probably a number of reasons expense, transport expenses. But what I would like to think is that it s our Fresh From Florida Campaign. Cattleman got together a year ago and said how do we become a part of this Fresh from Florida? We simply said, calves gotta be born, raised, slaughtered in Florida in order for it to get the brand. We toyed with the 51% of its life and the cattleman said we re not doing it. Right now we got two slaughterhouses and that s getting pretty interesting. There is one down the street and the other is owned by Mr. Stroneck. We do a lot of market research the person that runs our marketing has a rich background in a number of brands and we have a lady who does nothing but manage brands who worked for Disney for many years. We are constantly doing market research and focus groups people want to buy local raised beef and I think that is one of the reasons why we are seeing more and more of these cattle fed out here. I was at a dinner Monday night, and 5 or 6 of these families have come together and they created a cattle company that are going to only raise Fresh from Florida breed.

7 They re going to the QR aspect where when you snap the photo on your phone it s going to show you al little bio of where that cow came from. We re seeing more and more of that. Publix would love to have an exclusive on Fresh from Florida beef. My point is that from a trend perspective it s interesting. You ve got a group of cattleman and women who see an opportunity. I think you re going to see the market shift towards these opportunities. Let s talk about some other things we are doing in Florida maybe you can learn something from it, hopefully. Florida is a state of 20million people and we have about 100 million tourists a year. And if you ever go through the Orlando airport they are all right there. We also have around 39,000 restaurants in Florida. So one of the things we started doing with the Fresh from Florida campaign we started targeting the very unique to Florida restaurants. The Columbia Restaurant is downtown Tampa, we approached the owner and we simply said would you agree to do a campaign that focused on only Florida products. One of the ranchers will go to the restaurant some evening, and people will really want to go meet the ranchers. It s almost like a book signing it s on the menu Fresh from Florida. Then the ranchers will stay around just chatting with people it seems to make a difference. This farm to table is a big deal. Another thing, we work very closely with the Florida Beef Council. You will begin to see some commercials coming out focused on recipes. We have a website more than 50% of the people who visit our website is looking for recipes. We have our own Chef. Chef Justin. He travels the world showing people how to cook proper beef.

8 Here is an interesting thing Ms. Smith mentioned the Check off program. Florida last legislative session, the cattlemen got together in Florida and voted to promote an additional state Check off. Governor Scott said he s not going to do this, seems too much like a tax, but what he would do is designate a reoccurring $1million dollars to your campaign. Of the 40 research projects that were submitted, they chose 13 and then the remainder of the money will go to promotion. They are going to invest around $300,000 this year doing nothing but promoting Florida beef. It s amazing. What s interesting is that the industry went to the government. You know how the check off works you go down to your extension office and if so many cattlemen vote for the check off it gets implemented. A million dollars can really go a long way. You may have a 3-year project that s $100,000 a year that only counts as $100,000 of your project. The Cattlemen are in complete control of that. I m going to begin to wrap it up, here s why this matters. What you do matters, and I don t need to tell you that. The world s population is about 7 billion people by 2050 we expect it to be 9 billion people is not that far away the challenge for US agriculture is how are you going to feed 9 billion people. It s something that should keep us all up at night. That s why the discussion of these GMOs matter. We have to win these arguments on GMOs and others. The one thing that makes the United States so special is the land and the soils. In closing, I appreciate what you do everyday, stay involved in this association. Go home and demand action from your departments of agriculture. The environmental challenges you may face I think we

9 are getting ahead of the water issues. I d like to open it up to any questions: Q: Can you elaborate on the demographics of the Florida consumer in relationship to USDA grades? A: No Q: Who can we go to in your industry to get that information? A: We have many people in our department that can get you that information I ll get it to Bruce. Q: We re a small Organization with a little over 500 members, how important is marketing for us and if so where should our focus be? A: I m not a marketing guy but I ve seen the difference it can make. I ve seen with this Fresh From Florida ya ll have an incredible brand. If I were ya ll, I would go home to whatever state you re in and call you state of agriculture department and ask them what kind of things they can do for you in regards to marketing. My point would be, it does matter, even with a quality reputation that your brand already has. The recipes there s just a lot of things. Chef Justin goes all around the world pushing products. We ve been focusing on Produce but when we focused on beef we saw the numbers move.